Mordechai Arymowicz

There’s a saying in Israel, and it strikes a chord for 20-year-old Mordy Arymowicz.The day before he flies out of New Zealand to the Middle East, he finds himself reciting it.

“The people build the army, the army builds the people.”

Arymowicz, who spent all his high school years at St Kentigern College in New Zealand, is set to join an elite unit of the Israel Defense Forces after spending nearly a year in a special preparation course called mekhina.

Read more: Former St Kentigern student spent gap year preparing for Israel Defense Forces – NZ Herald

Swedish police have granted a neo-Nazi group permission to march near a synagogue in the city of Gothenburg at the end of September—but local Jews are fighting to have the decision overturned.

The demonstration by the far-right Nordic Resistance Movement not only passes the holy building, but also falls on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, The Local reported.

“It’s the day of the year when many Jews who normally don’t go to the synagogue will gather there.

Read more: Ahead of Jewish High Holidays, Nazis Are Marching on a Synagogue in Sweden

Aura Information Security general manager Peter Bailey says there is an untapped opportunity for New Zealand’s cyber security companies to learn from Israeli experts.

A one hour drive away from Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque where Israeli troops have clashed with praying Palestinians in recent weeks, lies a budding technology and cyber security start-up community.

A New Zealand delegation of 30 private sector and Government cyber security representatives visited it in June and were blown away by Tel Aviv entrepreneurs’ efforts amidst adversity.

Aura Information Security general manager and delegate Peter Bailey said the pressures of war had prompted innovation in Israel.

At least 20,000 of Israel’s 8 million people worked in cyber security, possibly making it the next SIlicon Valley for technology companies, Bailey said.

He said New Zealand entrepreneurs should take note of Israeli’s unwavering pride, courage and go getter attitudes. They have so much audacity they even have a name for it – chutzpah.

“As far as the work they deliver, a lot of that is done in New Zealand already, we are just not as good as promoting it,” Bailey said.

Read more: Move over Silicon Valley, New Zealand techies take note of Israeli entrepreneurs | Stuff.co.nz

Herd manager Udi Stainbaum works at a dairy farm in Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, southern Israel. Israeli dairy farmers provide milk in a country that is two-thirds desert, with little grazing land, using high tech methods and a lot of imported feed.

Israeli cows are the most productive in the world, says Afimilk professional services manager Yoni Levine.

The average Israeli cow produces about 1100 kilograms of milksolids a year compared to the New Zealand average of 373kg/MS.

At the Fieldays in Hamilton, Levine said the difference in production between the two was understandable because Israeli cows were fed on silage and grains, whereas in New Zealand they ate mostly pasture.

Read more: Israeli cows lead the world in milk production | Stuff.co.nz

France’s Interior Minister, Gerard Collomb

France’s Interior Minister strongly condemned a vicious antisemitic hate crime in Paris that occurred last Thursday, in which three members of a Jewish family were tied up, beaten and robbed by attackers who told their victims, “you are Jews, you have money.”

Interior Minister Gérard Collomb decried what he called “a cowardly act” that “seems directly linked to the religion of its victims” in a statement issued on Sunday.

Collomb expressed his “profound support for the family and for the Jewish institutions of France.”

“Every effort will be made to identify and arrest the authors of this odious aggression,” a statement from Collomb’s office said. “The Minister has full confidence in the Paris police services to take determined action in this enquiry.” The statement pledged that France’s government would “do everything to indefatigably combat every form of racism and antisemitism, which have no place in the French Republic.”

Read more: French Interior Minister Denounces ‘Cowardly, Odious’ Assault on Sephardic Leader and His Family by Antisemitic Gang | Jewish & Israel News Algemeiner.com

French soldier secures the entrance to a Jewish school in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher terrorist attacks last January. (photo credit:REUTERS)

A former principal at a preparatory school for teenagers in Marseille said that he regularly advised Jews not to attend his institution for fear of harassment by other students.

The revelation, that has grabbed front-page headlines in mainstream media in France, came in a newly-published book coauthored by the retired principle, Bernard Ravet, and Emmanuel Davindenkoff, a Le Monde journalist.

In an interview for the L’Express newspaper, Ravet recalled one case in which he as the principal of a public school asked a counterpart from a private Jewish school in Marseille to accept an Israeli boy whose mother wanted to enroll him at Ravet’s school.

Ravet said he “knew the boy would get beat to pulp” as soon as the other students realize he is an Israeli Jew. “Hiding my embarrassment, I asked the mother whether she had considered enrolling her boy at Yavneh,” a Jewish school in Marseille, said Ravet, who used to head the Versaille prep school in the same city.

After the mother said Yavneh was full, Ravet intervened to have the boy accepted there anyway, he told L’Express.

Ravet first realized his school was not unsuitable for Jews when a radio journalist, Edouard Zambeaux, asked some his students during interviews whether there were any Jews studying in their institution. “If there are, then they have to hide it,” one student said, sending “a chill down my back,” Ravet recalled.

Read more: French ex-principal advised Jewish students against attending his school – International – Jerusalem Post

The Elefant family in Czechoslovakia in 1928. Left to right, Helen, Edie, Magda, Klara and Ludwig.

Edith Eger was just 16 when she and her family were sent to Auschwitz in 1944. She accidentally sentenced her mother to death by revealing she was over 40. Here’s her story.

Music is playing as we arrive at Auschwitz. It’s a cold dawn in April 1944 and we’ve just been decanted from a cattle car, in which several people have died along the way.

But my father has just spied a big sign above the gates: “Arbeit macht frei,” it says – work sets you free. He is suddenly cheerful.

Read more: Edith Eger’s Holocaust memoir: ‘I condemned my mother to the gas chamber with one wrong word’ – NZ Herald

Students and staff members of Oxford School with Peter and Leslie Gaspar.

Will you be a bystander or an upstander? That was the question posed to Oxford Area School students by holocaust survivor Peter Gaspar.

​Gaspar gave a talk to the senior school along with visiting schools Rangiora New Life and Akaroa Area School, as part of a Project Hope tour, which brings holocaust survivors to New Zealand to share their experiences with Kiwi students.

Gaspar spoke of being born into Czechoslovakia in 1937, at the time of WWII and Nazi-occupied Europe.

His words stirred emotion in all those in the room, some visibly in tears as he spoke of living in a hole the size of a coffin in a paddock with his parents, and hiding for hours in a kitchen cupboard while Nazi soldiers drank with his smugglers at the dining table – not 2 metres from where he was hiding.

Read more: Holocaust survivor shares message of strength with students | Stuff.co.nz

An SS Officer speaks to a Jew in the Lodz Ghetto

September 5, 2017

Press Release – Shalom.Kiwi

A recent Sunday programme on TVNZ reported on a remarkable survivor of World War II who arrived in New Zealand in the 1950s. This was not a Jewish refugee who survived the war and the horrors of death camps.

Nor was the subject of celebration an ANZAC survivor of an alpine ski unit. The reporter, Cameron Bennett, was interviewing Willi Huber – a former Nazi Waffen SS soldier.

Huber’s Nazi past was given a light once-over treatment by a fawning Bennett. His main focus was the fact that the nonagenarian helped build the Mt Hutt ski resort, and is still skiing at his advanced age. It was a feel-good item that was poorly handled and that badly misfired.

Read more: Scoop Business » TVNZ honours Nazi soldier, minimises Holocaust